Victoire sailboats for sale

Buying a used Victoire: three yards, one name

A used Victoire is as much a bet on which company built it as on which model it is. The name covers three distinct Dutch companies across more than seven decades — a family-run Alkmaar yard, a short-lived restart, and a later custom-build specialist near Amsterdam — and each left a different kind of hull behind. None of those companies still exists, so tracing which era and which yard actually built a given boat does more to predict what a buyer is getting than the model name alone.

Which era to target

The original Jachtwerf Victoria/Victoire, founded in Alkmaar in 1934 under Cor Vader and later run by his son Klaas Vader from around 1987, produced the yard's full run — from the pioneering 1961 fiberglass Victoire 22 onward — until its September 2005 bankruptcy. Hulls from this era carry the longest production history and the most design continuity, since Koopmans supplied most of the designs across the span.

A restart followed in 2006: Victoire Yachts, financed by Aemstel Ventures with help from Gilles Botenbouw, the contractor who had handled the original yard's fitting-out work before its collapse. That company lasted barely two years, declaring its own bankruptcy in June 2008 — a narrow window that makes its hulls comparatively scarce, and brochure-only for some models: no V33 or V45 Centreboard was ever actually built.

ShipRepublic BV, headquartered in Monnickendam, took over around 2009–2010 and narrowed production to two models, the Victoire 37 and the V42RE — the latter reworked in hull, deck, and interior by Powerhouse Company. Because every ShipRepublic yacht was a semi-custom build, expect real variation between hulls even within the same model, down to a given owner's original spec choices. ShipRepublic folded in early 2017.

Navigating the lineup

The range runs from small early daysailers like the 22 and 25 up through cruising models such as the 933, 1122, and 1200/1270, to the larger 42-footers and the Andre Hoek-designed 51. Rather than shopping by size alone, buyers are better served identifying which of the three companies — and which designer, Koopmans, Hoek, or the Powerhouse-redesigned line — built a given hull, then narrowing further using the full model directory on this page.